cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/47629216
Chinese state media outlet China.com has published a report about a Tesla Model Y that lost all power on a highway despite showing 72 km of remaining range, and the story has gone viral across Chinese social media. The incident is drawing attention not just for the failure itself, but for the fact that state-controlled media chose to amplify it, a potential signal of shifting government sentiment toward Tesla in China.
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Seems odd to make how many km left as part of the story (that focus on despite 72km…), seems like a power system failure and not a the battery was reporting a wrong amount and they drove it empty situation.
And that is going to be the real issue. No good new cars, car sales crash in Europe and China, while the US is trying to keep out BEVs. That is why Musk supported Harris in the last election or something like that.
The real issue here is imo that the Chinese party-state amplifies the failure of a Western car, while it censors everything that is only slightly critical of Chinese companies or the Chinese government in general. Fuck Tesla, but all other non-Chinese cars (and products in other industries) receive the same treatment in China.
It sounds like this is a change (at least for Tesla), that Chinese state media should report so negatively about Tesla.
On the other side of the Pacific, I don’t expect that fox news is particularly flattering about Chinese EVs. But China is a massive market for Tesla, and it has stood up well while the European market has cratered for them. So this change in stance is potentially significant.
Or, it could be just a single article that we shouldn’t read too much into.
It’s certainly hard to make an inference from a single incident. What we can say is that anything critical of China is rigorously censored in mainland China, while non-Chinese incidents are conveyed with a critical spin. The goal is to portray China - or, rather, its government - as superior.
This is certainly also the case in many US and Western media such as FoxNews in the US as you say. I fully agree that many here in the West have an agenda. Unlike China, however, we in the West have a broad spectrum of media outlets with many of them being independent. For example, we can find many articles critical of Donald Trump in various US media despite his administration’s current move toward autocracy, but you can’t find even a single piece in Chinese media that is critical of Xi Jinping.
